Top 100 Quotes About Liberty
#1. The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this.
Ron Paul
#2. The Revolution in the United States was produced by a mature and thoughtful taste for liberty, and not by a vague and undefined instinct for independence.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#3. I believe in the support of the public school as one of the cornerstones of American liberty. I believe in the right of every parent to choose whether his child shall be educated in the public school or in a religious school supported by those of his own faith.
Al Smith
#4. The people's liberties strengthen the king's prerogative, and the king's prerogative is to defend the people's liberties.
Charles I Of England
#5. The Founders believed that pluralism survived only within the concept of religious liberty espoused by American Christianity.
David Barton
#7. Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'.
Richard Stallman
#8. Liberty ... is one of the most valuable blessings that Heaven has bestowed upon mankind.
Miguel De Cervantes
#9. I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government.
Milton Friedman
#10. I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred.
A.E. Samaan
#11. The happy Union of these States is a wonder; their Constitution a miracle; their example the hope of Liberty throughout the world.
James Madison
#12. Like Liberty, gold never stays where it is undervalued.
John Morrill
#13. No one wants their stuff stolen. No one wants their physical person harmed. If you understand the implications of those two truths, you can come to see the egregious moral and practical problems of a state-managed society.
Jeffrey Tucker
#14. The Anarchists never have claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow authority.
Benjamin Tucker
#15. Careful what you wish for; the darkness in my heart is kept in check by the smallest amount of light.
Liberty Stone
#16. I have dashed across continents and oceans as a fugitive and have matched my wits with the police and secret agents seeking to deprive me of one of the greatest blessings man can have-liberty.
Jack Johnson
#17. Man usually thinks liberty is the power of doing what he likes to do. That is license.
Austin O'Malley
#18. There has to be so many other ways of approaching airline security than demeaning ourselves by giving up a lot of our dignities and our liberty to do this.
Quico Canseco
#19. And just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify it around an idea. And that idea is liberty.
Tony Blair
#20. England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#21. We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.
Ronald Reagan
#22. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberty.
George Washington
#24. I will take any liberty I want with facts as long as I don't trespass on the truth ... We confuse facts with truth.
Farley Mowat
#26. The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.
H.L. Mencken
#27. The siren song of redistribution of wealth by centralized government never ceases for those who seek irreversible and unusurpable control over the lives and liberties of private citizens.
Josh Jones
#28. A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious ... When conducted with magnanimity, justice and humanity, it ought to command the admiration of every friend to human nature. But if sullied by crimes and extravagancies, it loses its respectability.
Alexander Hamilton
#29. Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.
Thomas Paine
#30. The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
Will Self
#31. After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary.
William J. Brennan
#32. We don't really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty.
Julian Fellowes
#33. Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
D.H. Lawrence
#34. Let not ambition take possession of you; love the friends of the people, but reserve blind submission for the law and enthusiasm for liberty.
Marquis De Lafayette
#36. A person whose desires and impulses are his own - are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture - is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character ...
John Stuart Mill
#37. The message of individual liberty and peace is contagious.
Vince Vaughn
#38. Our flag is a proud flag, and it stands for liberty and civilization. Where it has once floated, there must be no return to tyranny.
Theodore Roosevelt
#39. Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain
Marquis De Sade
#40. I took the liberty of ascertaining as much beforehand, my lord."
"Of course you did, Bunter. You always ascertain everything.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#41. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.
James Madison
#42. If the choice is given to us of liberty or security, we must scorn the latter with the proper contempt of free man and the sound judgment of wise men who know that liberty and security are not incompatible in the lives of honest men.
James Farley
#43. Liberty and choice are the essential components that constitute human dignity.
Khaled Abou El Fadl
#45. I would define liberty to be a power to do as we would be done by. The definition of liberty to be the power of doing whatever the law permits, meaning the civil laws, does not seem satisfactory.
John Adams
#46. Pledge allegiance to your principles, your family, your faith, but don't be foolish enough to pledge allegiance to a gang of thieves.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#47. Of course same sex marriage is constitutional! The right to be yourself, to pursue life, liberty, and property, is protected several ways over several amendments. John Boehner should know this.
Henry Rollins
#48. A government capable of controlling the whole, and bringing its force to a point, is one of the prerequisites for national liberty. We combine in society, with an expectation to have our persons and properties defended against unreasonable exactions either at home or abroad.
Oliver Ellsworth
#49. But in all things whether we shall make only a due use of the liberties we have asked, is left entirely to the judicious reader to decide.
Sarah Fielding
#50. Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.
Daniel Webster
#51. What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.
G.K. Chesterton
#53. It is necessary to curb the power of government. This is the task of all constitutions, bills of rights and laws. This is the meaning of all struggles which men have fought for liberty.
Ludwig Von Mises
#54. We will go no place where we cannot take our Master with us. While others take their liberty to sin, We will not renounce our liberty to rebuke and confront them.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#56. If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
[Freedom of the Park, Tribune, 7 December 1945]
George Orwell
#57. Nature gives liberty even to dumb animals.
Tacitus
#58. If you don't have liberty and self-determination, you've got nothing, that's what this is what this country is built on. And this is the ultimate self-determination, when you determine how and when you're going to die when you're suffering.
Jack Kevorkian
#59. The union of the family lies in love; and love is the only reconciliation of authority and liberty.
Robert Hugh Benson
#60. Very few tyrants argued for the slavery of the masses. Instead, they argued for their right to protect the people from themselves.
A.E. Samaan
#61. Religious liberty is the first freedom in our Constitution. And whether the cause is justice for the persecuted, compassion for the needy and the sick, or mercy for the child waiting to be born, there is no greater force for good in the nation than Christian conscience in action.
Mitt Romney
#62. A mass of ignorant, culturally degraded citizens easily becomes an immense drag on the system. They become easy prey to demagogues and applaud every attempt to undermine the foundations of that "natural liberty" which they have enjoyed in the first place.
Arthur Herman
#63. The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.
Harry Browne
#64. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. - Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States (1928)
Jane Mayer
#65. You may name a bronze statue 'Liberty,' or a painted figure in a city hall 'Commerce,' or a marble form in a temple 'Athene' or 'Venus;' but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman.
George Edward Woodberry
#66. I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself.
John Adams
#67. Discipline must come through liberty ... We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.
Maria Montessori
#68. Not only can no one predict the future, we don't understand the present - and there isn't even any certainty about the past.
Harry Browne
#69. The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.
Frederic Bastiat
#70. It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.
Alexander Hamilton
#71. Our long-term security depends on our deep faith in liberty. And we'll continue to promote freedom around the world.
George W. Bush
#72. All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.
George W. Bush
#73. The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated.
William Ellery Channing
#74. Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty.
John Adams
#75. I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescension of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen.
Woodrow Wilson
#76. There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
Walter Lippmann
#77. My father ran a famous L.A. nightclub complete with roller-rink - Flippers - in the early Eighties which was the West Coast's answer to Studio 54.
Liberty Ross
#78. What fools are we, to be besotted with the love of our own trouble, and to hate our liberty and rest!
Joseph Hall
#79. For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
Cyril Connolly
#80. The preservation of liberty, not the promotion of efficiency, is the primary justification for private property. Efficiency is a happy, though not accidental, by-product - and a most important by-product because liberty could not have survived if it had not also produced affluence.
Milton Friedman
#82. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness ... but only when you pay your taxes? That means your freedom is rented, leased, & not unalienable.
Steve Maraboli
#83. Because the American people champion liberty, more people in the world live free today than at any time in history. Yet, there is more to be done and it is America who will lead the way.
Dick Armey
#84. Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.
G.K. Chesterton
#85. A nation is truly corrupted when having ... lost its character and it's liberty, it passes from democracy to aristocracy or to monarchy. That is the decrepitude and death of the body politic ...
Maximilien De Robespierre
#86. We ought to be very cautious and circumspect in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty.
Baron De Montesquieu
#87. Liberty is more precious than money or office; and we should be vigilant lest we purchase wealth or place at the price of inner freedom.
John Lancaster Spalding
#88. It has been forever that people aspire towards liberty and rejoiced averytime they lost it. The mortals never loved with passion except those who handcuffed them . And whom they turn into myth? The executioners of their freedom
Cioran
#89. To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one's piece to the government. It proves that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them.
Victor Hugo
#90. The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it.
Robert H. Jackson
#91. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.
George Orwell
#93. For gracious sake, don't talk about Liberty; we have quite enough of that.
Charles Dickens
#94. My main object in making a motion picture is entertainment. If at the same time I can strike a blow for liberty, then I'll stick one in.
John Wayne
#95. Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#96. History may well record that we served liberty and saved freedom when we undertook a crash program in the field of education ... I hope this bill is only the forerunner of better things to come.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#97. I predict that the time will come in this once free America when the battle for religious liberty will have to be fought over again, and will probably be lost, because the people are already ignorant of its true basis and conditions.
Robert Dabney
#98. Flowers are lovely; love is flower-like;
Friendship is a sheltering tree;
Oh the joys that came down shower-like,
Of friendship, love, and liberty,
Ere I was old!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#99. Freedom and Liberty cannot exist without Individual Responsibilty. Failure to exercise Individual Responsibilty forfeits your right to self-governance and delivers it to Government which, through force, will set the parameters of your life.
Brian Wilson
#100. Whether we speak of the death to self or a sinking down in humility and meekness before God or faith in the Lamb of God, it all means one thing - a deliverance from self to find our liberty and our blessedness in the living sacrifice of ourselves for all around us. THE END
Andrew Murray
